Fur and Gold

The first wave of Europeans to arrive on the west coast came overland in search of fur-bearing mammals. The first to reach the coast was Simon Fraser, who was sent west by the North West Company to establish a coastal trading post. In 1806 he reached the Pacific Ocean via the river that was later named for him, and in 1808 he built a fur fort east of today’s Vancouver. In 1827, the Hudson’s Bay Company established its own trading post, Fort Langley, on the Fraser River 48 kilometers (30 miles) east of present-day downtown Vancouver. Neither of these two outposts spawned a permanent settlement, although Fort Langley was relocated farther upstream in 1838. This new outpost became a hub of the fur trade, and in 1858, when British Columbia became a crown colony, Fort Langley was declared the capital. But the fort’s glory days were to be short-lived.

When gold was discovered on the upper reaches of the Fraser River in the late 1850s, the British government, worried that the influx of Americans was a threat to its sovereignty, declared the whole western expanse of Canada a British colony, as it had for Vancouver Island in 1849. The most important task for James Douglas, the colony’s first governor, was to establish a permanent settlement. Unimpressed by the location of Fort Langley, Douglas selected a site farther downstream, named it New Westminster, and declared it the new capital of the mainland colony.

© Andrew Hempstead, from Moon Western Canada, 3rd Edition